The ‘Engaging Sexual Stories’ project has used creative arts and online technologies to produce innovative, free-to-use resources that are based on the evidence generated by Natsal to improve knowledge of sex and relationships that speak to people across the lifecourse and from all walks-of-life.

Resources available:

For everyone:

Online interactive educational tools delivered via The Open University’s OpenLearn to explore the data collected by the last Natsal on key topics around sexual attitudes, behaviours and health, as well as ‘the science of Natsal’, including its methods and limitations

• ‘5 facts you didn’t know about sex in Britain’ animation – viewing time: 2 minutes
• ‘No sex please, we’re British!’ quiz – activity time: 10 minutes
• ‘Sex stats for the British population’ interactive resource – activity time: 15 minutes or more
• ‘Five surprising facts about sex and the pandemic’ article – reading time 5 minutes

For anyone teaching relationship and sex education (‘RSE’):

•  A free to access, self-directed e-learning course on Brook Learn. ‘Introduction to RSE’ is available in English and shortly Welsh and has two modules:
  • Teaching and learning about sex
  • Building your RSE curriculum with young people
• ‘Crush Cards’ to use to facilitate dialogue between educators and for educators to adapt to use with young people on how they are learning about Relationships and Sexuality, free to download in English and Welsh
• Free to download infographics presenting key findings from Natsal-3 on how young people reported they learnt about sex and relationships, created in partnership with the Sex Education Forum

What’s next for the Engaging Sexual Stories project?

The Engaging Sexual Stories project aimed to make the findings from Natsal more accessible to people beyond scientific researchers so we hope you feel that we have achieved this! The project was also about demonstrating proof-of-concept around using these new ways of engaging the public with Natsal, which we aim to update and improve upon once the findings from the next round of Natsal, Natsal-4, are available. If you have any suggestions that you would like us to take on board going forward then feel free to email us [natsal@ucl.ac.uk]. If you have specific feedback about the ‘Sex stats for the British population’ interactive resource, you can provide your feedback about this resource using the feedback form. If you have specific feedback about the Brook Learn course, you can provide feedback about this resource in the post-course evaluation.

Acknowledgements:

Funding: Wellcome Research Enrichment Public Engagement Award

Project team: Cardiff University, The Open University, UCL, Brook, & S-Digital

Resources for RSE teachers

These infographics on learning about sex created from Natsal-3 data in collaboration with the Sex Education Forum are freely available to download and use. Brook Sexual Health also has lots of free resources to download here and Brook Learn has a wide range of e-learning courses for RSE teachers.